Parallax View

Wednesday, 15 November 2017

There can’t seriously be anyone in the community who hasn’t
heard of FHISO (Family History Information
Standards Organisation), but how many of you might have written it off? If so
then look again! I want to raise awareness of its recent substantial progress,
and to challenge pundits to evaluate its relevance.

History

To put this article in context, let’s just wind things back
to 2010. Pat Richley-Erickson (alias DearMYRTLE), Greg Lamberson, and Russ
Worthington, had become so fed up with the problems of sharing basic
genealogical data that they created the BetterGEDCOM wiki: its goal being to
produce an internationally applicable standard for the sharing and long-term
storage of genealogical data.

Although this wiki garnered huge support — 134 members
within its first year, contributing over 3,000 pages and 8,500 discussion posts
— no actual standard emerged. The reasons for this were manyfold: there was no
real structure or assigned responsibilities in the membership, the goal was too
poorly defined (what genealogical scope? what level of backwards
compatibility?), and there was no technical strategy (what technologies? what
file formats?). As a result, discussions — valuable as they were — became mired
in minutia, no consensus was reached, and nothing was formally written up.

Early in 2012, a small group of BetterGEDCOM members formed
FHISO with the goal of overcoming these failings. They spent considerable
effort designing an organisation that would accommodate a large and diverse
number of contributors, and in planning for consensus-building and digital
organisation.

In April 2012, it received
a grant from genealogist Megan
Smolenyak to help get the organisation started, and during the remainder of
2012 it pulled off an incredible coup by getting industry support from the
following high-profile Founding Members (in chronological order of announcement):

These posts were mostly concerned with proprietary versus
community standards. GEDCOM-X was new and people believed that it would be a
competing de facto standard —
exacerbated by the fact that FamilySearch weren’t in the list of Founding
Members, above. This turned out to be ill-founded paranoia (more on this in a
moment), but even FHISO was defensive and quietly concerned, as can be inferred
from GeneJ’s contribution to Randy’s summary.

During March 2013, in order to try and keep membership
attention in the absence of technical work, FHISO began its Call For Papers initiative. The idea
was that people could send in their ideas and proposals in preparation for more
consensus-based work. Although quite a few papers were submitted, and on a wide
range of topics, the number of distinct submitters was small — possibly an
unrecognised warning to FHISO that few people would find the time or
inclination if the effort was onerous.

The investigations into software tools for the burgeoning
organisation showed that good ones were too expensive for FHISO and the cheap
(or free) ones didn’t deliver what was needed, and this work dragged on for too
long. Over the years, Board members have had to reach deep into their personal
pockets to help move the organisation to the point where it would be fair for
members to subscribe for another year (original memberships have been
continually extended, for free, since August 2014).

During 2013–14, there were a number of team changes, and it
would be a fair criticism to say that FHISO dropped
the ball during these changes. There was little visible activity to people
outside of FHISO (as explained by Tamura: Genealogy 2013: events
& trends, 31 Dec 2013) and so it was to be expected that the community
would lose interest in it.

During 2014, FHISO finally established its TSC (Technical
Standing Committee), and so began the real technical work. This included the
creation of the TSC-Public mailing list,
and the creation of several exploratory groups, each of which had its own
mailing list. However, the mailing lists demonstrated the same issues that were
previously experienced in BetterGEDCOM: topics digressed and discussions
meandered without formal conclusions. Such discussions must necessarily resort
to a bewildering and ever-evolving technical vocabulary, and software people
generally find it hard to explain their concepts in familiar terms without
losing technical accuracy. It was truly amazing, therefore, that some
well-known non-software genealogists participated, and I genuinely take my hat
off to those that succeeded in balancing the discussions with real-world
genealogical issues.

Quandary

When the flurry of posts on these mailing lists began to
fizzle out, and the exploratory groups all floundered, FHISO took a deep breath
and a long look at the reality of standards development. If it was going to
achieve its goals then it needed to better-understand why other initiatives had
failed, and it clearly needed to adopt a quite different approach.

It became evident that the hardest part of standards
development was not the technical side but the commercial and/or political
side. Creating a new data representation has some technical challenges, but
it’s doable; there were several examples out there, ranging from the old GEDCOM
to more recent data models, file formats, database schemas, and APIs, all coming
from a range of commercial products and private research projects. But despite its
age and deprecated status, GEDCOM was still the most widely-used way of
exchanging data. There were those who believed that the industry could stay
with GEDCOM, and that its problems and equivocality could be fixed in a new
version. Then there were those who believed that this would restrict the
evolution of genealogy, and that we must leapfrog lineage-linked data to include
non-person subjects of history, or to integrate real research-based narrative.
In reality, none of these viewpoints were entirely correct, … or incorrect.

If a new data representation were to be produced — even just
an updated GEDCOM — then it would be unlikely that the industry would immediately
embrace it for the simple fact that commercial stakeholders would have a
financial commitment to their current internal data models, and to their
supported modes of import/export. Companies and their products would have
evolved along with their internal data model; any new data model with larger
scope — no matter how powerful or modern — would have no impact if it required
companies to abandon their existing products and to start again. For instance,
taking advantage of the powerful analogy between persons and places as
historical subjects would not help companies whose import/export was entirely
via GEDCOM, or whose internal data models had not recognised the analogy. Data
models such as GEDCOM-X were designed around the specific requirements of the
parent organisation, and not as future-proofed models to be shared by all
genealogical software.

Another issue was that there were many stakeholders out
there (including every user who simply wanted to exchange data without error or
loss), but fewer people prepared to openly contribute on mailing lists, and
fewer still who had the time and skills to produce formal written material.
FHISO’s impressive Founding Members seemed content to sit on the sidelines, and
there was little (if any) engagement with them following the original
announcements.

This was a tough problem. There was no doubt that the
industry needed not just an open standard but an evolutionary path: one that
would permit ‘software genealogy’ to mature, and to become part of the modern
digital world. However, there was clearly some apathy to doing the heavy lifting, and there could be later
resistance to anything too radical.

If ever the term
catch-22 found its true mark then it was in the field of software genealogy.

The first thing to be done was to modify the organisational
structure to one more appropriate to the reach of genealogical standards —
FHISO was not a general-purpose ISO or ANSI. FHISO already had the concept of
an Extended Organisational Period (EOP), now embodied in article 24 of its by-laws, during which the membership would
be populated (including the Founding Members), new officers appointed and roles
filled, and the TSC established. The EOP also allowed the Board to amend the
by-laws as necessary, and without the need for an Annual General Meeting (AGM).
It may have been envisaged that the EOP would only last for maybe six months,
but it was still in effect at this time of change.

From a technical perspective, FHISO needed a focus:
something concrete that could be debated, cited, and built upon. It would
therefore be necessary for a core of dedicated people to form a Technical
Project Team (as allowed by the TSC Charter) to establish a technical strategy and
to publish a selection of draft component standards in order to kick-start
subsequent work.

These processes could all be done within the remit of the
EOP, but it would have to keep the membership (and the public) aware; certain
organisations would not acknowledge any third-party standard unless it was
developed through a proper transparent process by an incorporated organisation.
FHISO does publish regular Board minutes
and TSC minutes, but it would only
be allowed to publish draft standards for comment during this period (not
official standards) since there would be no voting mechanism. Until this work
had reached an acceptable level, and elections and AGMs could be resumed, then it
was deemed inappropriate to require existing members to pay for each year.

Part of FHISO’s technical strategy was to focus on what
might be called component standards:
standards related to specific parts of genealogical data (e.g. personal names,
citation elements, place references, dates), and allow these to be integrated
into existing data models. This would not preclude the future publishing of a
single FHISO data model that embraced all of these components, but for the
shorter term it would allow existing data models to incorporate them more
quickly, while minimising the impact on their core software. The basis for this
was that, within certain limits, it should be possible to have distinct
proprietary data models cooperating if they shared a common currency.

FHISO had previously used the analogy of car design to
explain this strategy; rather than standardise what cars we can drive, there would
be benefit in standardising the parts from which all cars are made. Well,
there’s a real instance of this that can be cited: all the cars around the
world (with a few exotic examples that can be ignored) share the same wheel hub
sizes. There is a standard set of accepted sizes, and they’re all measured in
Imperial units — even in countries that use the metric system. This means that
the same range of tyres can be used for all our cars, no matter which model or
where it was manufactured.

The plan, therefore, was to work on a number of these
component standards, each of which would include details of how it should be
integrated into existing data models — the so-called “bindings”. But there was a
problem here: GEDCOM-X could never supplant GEDCOM because there were probably
millions of GEDCOM files still out there, and software products that were tied
to the GEDCOM model. These problems for FamilySearch effectively mirrored those
of FHISO’s standardisation effort, but for the component standards to work then it required a version of GEDCOM
that could be taken forwards. If those companies that were bound to GEDCOM were
not to be left behind then there had to be a new version of it, one for which
bindings could be defined for FHISO’s new component standards. The two initial data
models of interest, therefore, would be GEDCOM and GEDCOM-X.

The following diagram illustrates how these component
standards would be assimilated by the various data models, including a
supported GEDCOM continuation (shown here as “ELF”).

Figure 1 – FHISO Component Standards.

FHISO ELF

GEDCOM hasn’t been updated in decades, and there are
acknowledged weaknesses and ambiguities in its specification. Furthermore, the
name is still the property of FamilySearch.

FHISO would, therefore, define a fully compatible format
called Extended Legacy Format, or ELF for short. ELF v1.0 would be compatible
with GEDCOM 5.5(.1), such that ELF could be loaded by a GEDCOM processor, and vice versa. This means not only that
stakeholders could declare support for ELF v1.0 with not too much effort, but also
that there would be no reasonable excuse for not declaring support.

Of all FHISO’s draft standards, ELF is probably the most
important since it presents a future for GEDCOM data and software, a future
that would support enhanced movement of data both between compliant
products and between differing proprietary data models.

As well as being a supported and more tightly-specified
version of GEDCOM, ELF would include an extension mechanism that would be
employed in later versions to embrace the FHISO component standards, and any third-party
extensions by using proper namespaces.

During the preparation of the first ELF draft, FHISO engaged
with members of the German group GEDCOM-L,
which represents over twenty genealogical programs over there. Their goal since
2009 has been to reach agreement on the interpretation of the GEDCOM 5.5.1
specification, and to extend it to include a number of “user-defined tags”. For
instance, high among their priorities was support for the German Rufname, or
“appellation name”, which is an everyday form of personal name.

FHISO intends to utilise the knowledge and experience of the
GEDCOM-L group in making a better GEDCOM.

Milestones and Signposts

Industry contacts had identified a citation-element
vocabulary — a representation of the discrete elements of data within citations
— as filling an important niche in today's standards, and so this became the
focus of the first component standard.

In 2016, the Technical Project Team began to draft possible
standards text, releasing an early draft micro-format for a citation-element ‘creator name’ for comment in the
spring. During June 2017, FHISO was able to publish a number of high-quality
draft standards for public comment,
and during the September it incorporated public feedback from its TSC-Public
mailing list.

This milestone puts
FHISO ahead of all previous standards initiatives! The level of detail and
accuracy in these drafts, combined with the choice of technologies, establishes
a future-proof model that could take genealogical data as far as is needed, and
so it sets the bar for all future FHISO work.

The next phase will involve releasing draft citation-element
bindings for both GEDCOM-X and GEDCOM. Already released is a draft bindings document for RDFa.
Rather than being a genealogical data model, RDFa defines a set of
attribute-level extensions to HTML. This is especially interesting as it allows
pre-formatted citations to have their embedded elements marked-up. The industry
norm is to first define the individual citation elements as discrete items, and
then rely on some citation template system to build them into a formatted
citation. Traditional genealogists, and anyone who prefers to hand-craft their
own citations (including me), should welcome this inverted alternative as it
recognises the power and flexibility of citations as sentences rather than
formulae.

Affiliation

Although currently acting
chairman on the FHISO Board, I write this article as someone who has always
believed that standardisation absolutely
must happen in our field. It borders on hypocrisy that users are expected
to collaborate on unified trees, and to play fair with each other, when the
large organisations have been unable to set a precedent with their data
sharing.

Monday, 2 October 2017

These people have explored the possibilities and made
valuable suggestions, including some with developer experience, and including
one person running it under the WINE compatibility layer on a Mac (it was designed
to run under Windows).

With the release of v3.0, the utility became a proper
product rather than just a POC, and a number of enhancements and fixes were
applied during the sub-releases of v3.0. These culminated in thumbnail images
being supported in the browser output, and by the Tree Designer’s Edit-Person
form, in v3.2.0.

An installation kit, documentation, and samples were placed
in a Dropbox folder from where they can be downloaded by people who sign-up (either
by contacting me via email, or from the right-hand panel of my blog).

The main purpose of this post is to announce the release of
v4.0 of the utility, and to demonstrate a couple of the new features. The
following is a summary of the new features, in roughly chronological order:

Implemented 'id=' attributes on person-boxes so that they
can be referenced by URLs and scrolled into view. This allows narrative text
to reference specific person boxes in an SVG tree.

Support for images and captions together in the Tree
Designer person boxes, as per the browser output.

Implemented menu options to copy and paste persons or
families (e.g. between different sessions).

Include optional pan-zoom support for browser from
external source. This allows the contents of specific SVG images to be
panned and zooomed (see user guide).

Changed border and text of empty boxes to feint grey to
avoid them being too obtrusive.

The Tree Designer’s window size and position are now saved
and restored. It is no longer always maximized.

Implemented zoom control in Tree Designer via menu
options, and Ctrl/+ or Ctrl/- keystrokes (very similar to Web browsers).

Added simple HTML toolbar to help with editing person and
family notes.

Implemented a RootKey parameter to emphasise the
direct-line of a particular person up through ancestral generations.

One of the features I especially want to present is the
Pan-Zoom feature. This uses open-source Javascript code to allow a user to
navigate around a specific SVG tree image. It eliminates the need for both
clunky scrollbars and the standard browser zoom support, which affects the
whole page.

The first example is a tree that includes both images and
captions in each of the boxes. Tooltips are enabled if you let the mouse hover
over a box or a family circle. The +/Reset/- control in the bottom-right corner
shows that the Pan-Zoom code is active, and so you can navigate around the tree
and magnify/shrink it. Also, clicking on a box expands the picture into a separate tab.

The second example shows a tree in the vertical orientation.
This has the information panels enabled so clicking on a box or family circle
will pop-up a panel with historical or biographical details below the tree — Ctrl+Click
or Shift+Click on the boxes or circles will dismiss those panels. This tree
also incorporates the Pan-Zoom code.

William Ashbee was born c1803 in Hillsley, Gloucestershire, England,
and died 14 Jan 1870 at 2 York Cottages, Grosvenor Terrace, Cheltenham, of 'Disease of the heart'.
William was originally a baker and grocer but tried to get into publishing. In 1868, he fell foul of a copyright
case that proved to be important for later digital data and databases. This case bankrupted him and he died
shortly after.

Ann, or "Annie", was born c1801 in Westonbirt, Gloucestershire, England,
and died 29 Nov 1869 at 30 Smith Terrace, Chelsea, of 'Asthma, disease of the heart, many years'.

Thomas Ashbee was born c1826 in Tetbury, Gloucestershire, and died 1891 in the same county. He was a tin worker and
this contributed to a dementia causing him to be described as an 'imbecile' in the 1891 census. He was married twice
during his life.

John Ashbee was born c1831 in Westonbirt, Tetbury, and died 22 Apr 1912 at 67 Ringford Road, Wansworth, London.

Emma Jane Ashbee (later Stanton) was born c1834 in Tetbury, Gloucestershire, and died 22 Apr 1924 (same date as her father) at 59
Norland Road, Nottingham.

William Stanton was born c1833 in Bishops Cleeve, Gloucestershire. Death uncertain. Possibly in Bicester, Oxfordshire, in 1924.

Mary Sandford was born c1834 in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, and died 1871 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

William Ashbee was born 29 Nov 1836 in Tetbury, Gloucestershire, and died 24 Jan 1907 at 48 Cannon Street, Glasshoughton, West Yorkshire.

Following the reading of the banns on 18 Jun 1825, William Ashbee married Ann Hayward in the parish of Westonbirt,
Gloucestershire, England.

William Stanton married Mary Sandford in c1856 in Cheltenham. They had three children.

After the death of his first wife, William Stanton married Emma Jane Ashbee on 21 Nov 1872 at Gloucester St. Catharine.
They had three children.

William Ashbee married Mary Ann Hale in Holborn, London, in c1866.
They had eight children.

William Henry Proctor married Annie Emma Isabel Stanton at Nottingham Emmanuel on 29 Nov 1891.
They had eleven children.

William Henry Ashbee married Helenor Gertrude Norton in Chorlton, Lancashire, in 1893. There were no children.

After the death of his first wife, William Henry Ashbee married Evelyn A. Graham at Sale St. Anne, Chester, on 1 Aug 1904.

Notice that the panel for Mary Ashbee includes links to blog
articles that mention her, as well as an image of her. Because such content is
HTML-based then it can also include footnotes, tables, document scans, and
more.

A larger example of Pan-Zoom that also incorporates the new direct-line
RootKey feature may be found at Fieg & Sheehan Family,
courtesy of Robert Fieg.

The user guide now has a section on “Using SVG in the Real
World” since many sites have deliberately or neglectfully placed obstacles in
the path of people who seriously want to use SVG.

Saturday, 15 July 2017

Back in Impediment
to Marriage, I made a case for Thomas Meads, of Epperstone, Nottingham,
having never married Margaret Hallam because (a) she was born Margaret Astling
and was already married to Thomas Hallam, and (b) that Thomas Hallam was a
prisoner of war in Napoleonic France, so absent but not deceased. I now want to
follow-up on some the suggested further research, and show how this became an
exercise in correlation and visualisation.

The previous article noted that Margaret’s illegitimate
children could have become a financial burden on the parish of Epperstone, and so
the parish officers would have taken a keen interest in knowing who the father
was. It also noted that Margaret later seemed to be accepted in that parish,
which was the parish of settlement of Thomas Meads (her partner), rather than Screveton,
which was the parish of settlement of her husband.

A search for maintenance orders and bastardy bonds at the
Nottinghamshire Archives found nothing, but there was evidence of a removal order
for Margaret Hallam from Epperstone back to Screveton.

The original removal orders have not survived but the removal
order minute books have. The following two entries document a removal order
having been served, and a successful appeal against it by the parish of
Screveton.

10 Jul 1815:

Whereas a warrant on order of
removal under the hands and seals of Francis Evans Esq., and the Rev’d John
Kirkby, Clerk two of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace in and for the County
of Nottingham (one being of the Quoram) bearing date the 28 day of June last,
Margaret Hallam the wife of Thomas Hallam and their three children born since
her marriage, James aged about 8 years, Mary aged about 6 years and a half and
Henry aged about 5 years, were removed from the Parish of Epperstone in the
County of Nottingham to the Parish of Screveton in the said County as the last
place of their legal settlement and the said Parish of Screveton appealing at
this sessions against the said warrant or order of removal. The same was
ordered to be filed among the records of this sessions and such appeal to be
respited to the next General quarter sessions of the Peace to be holden at the
Shire Hall in Nottingham in and for the said County of Nottingham.[2]

16 Oct 1815 (appeal):

Whereas an appeal was entered at
the last General quarter sessions of the peace holden at the Shire Hall in
Nottingham in and for the County of Nottingham on the part of the Parish of
Screveton in the County of Nottingham against a warrant of removal whereby
Margaret Hallam, the wife of Thomas Hallam and their three children born since
her marriage James aged about 8 years, Mary aged about 6 years and a half and
Henry aged about 5 years were removed from the Parish of Epperstone in the
County of Nottingham to the said Parish of Screveton as the place of their last
legal settlement and the same was respited to this sessions and the merits
thereof being now tried and counsel and witness heard on both sides, it is
ordered by the court that the said warrant or order of removal so far as
respects the settlement of the said Margaret Hallam the mother be confirmed and
so far as respects the settlement of her said children be discharged.[3]

Although the minuted details were brief, these entries do
confirm Margaret’s situation, and her relationship to Thomas Hallam of
Screveton. More interesting, though, is what was not recorded.

The words describe Thomas Hallam in the present tense, implying
that he was not deceased, but they also talk about her first three children as
though they belonged to Thomas and Margaret Hallam. The Epperstone parish
register clearly shows that no father was recorded on their baptisms, and that
the clerk had added annotation of “base [born]” (see previous article). If
Thomas Hallam had been present then he would have strongly contested the
suggestion that they were his, and so we can infer that he was not only absent
but uncontactable.

From the Settlement Act 1662 until Removal Act 1795, the
Overseers of the Poor could remove anyone entering a parish that might become a
burden on it. That removal could happen within 40 days of a notice being
published. From 1795, no non-settled person could be removed from a parish
unless he or she actually applied for relief. Also, a person would acquire
settlement rights if they managed to stay for 40 days, and any illegitimate
children were granted settlement where they were born.[4]

This raises an interesting question: what was the trigger
for this removal order. Margaret’s children were all baptised, and presumably
born, in Epperstone, and so she had been there for several years without an
order being served. It wasn’t the death of Thomas Mead’s wife, Martha, as she
was buried later that year, on 8 Dec 1815. The previous article makes the case
that her husband, Thomas Hallam, had returned from France in the spring of the
previous year (1814), but had re-married (illegally) to Sarah Astin on 19 Dec
1814 in Nottingham. The obvious conclusion is that Margaret had applied for
parish relief during 1815.

But the appeal suggests that the order was confirmed for
Margaret but not for her children — enforcement of which I cannot imagine. If
Margaret was deemed to be settled in Screveton still then it implies that her
husband was known to be alive and that the parish of settlement associated with
him had greater weight than her having resided in Epperstone for some years. Maybe
she was removed because it was another four years before her and Thomas Meads
had a further five children together in Epperstone, and where the baptisms openly
recorded the names of both parents.

One last mystery: the minute book only mentions three of
Margaret’s children; Charlotte was baptised in Epperstone on 31 Jan 1813, so
why wasn’t she mentioned? No evidence of her dying could be found, and it
appears that she eventually married a William Brand on 23 Sep 1832 at nearby
Lowdham St. Mary the Virgin.[5]

Lineage

Two of the parish register extracts used in the previous
article had a note indicating “family details on fiche”. These registers, and
their fiche copies, are available in the Nottinghamshire Archives, and those
details were as follows:

Elizabeth the wife of James Asling
of Coddington, Taylor, daughter of Richard Taylor of Coddington, Labourer by
Elizabeth his wife died 30th January [1783], buried 1st of February, in the
church yard/aged 52 years/Distemper fever.[8]

In pre-modern medicine, an excess or deficiency of any of
four distinct bodily fluids known as humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile,
and phlegm) directly influenced their temperament and health; hence distemper. What it equates to now can
only be conjecture.

These two notes give plenty of information about the lineage
of James, and of the two wives: Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth Baker/Dickinson.
For the latter — the mother of Margaret Astling — we have her father’s surname
as Dickinson but we’ve already established that James had married an Elizabeth
Baker. It was not hard to show that Elizabeth Dickinson was baptised on 4 Jul
1743 to William Dickinson and Rebecca Goodbarne in Long Bennington,
Lincolnshire,[9] and had been
previously married to Thomas Baker in Coddington since 25 Aug 1766.[10]

Looking at James, we have a typically frustrating problem
because the same given name was used in different generations. Not only that, there
was at least one case of multiple marriages, and several instances of spouses
called Elizabeth or Mary. Trying to reconstitute families based purely on their
names and parish is not a good plan, and you really have to correlate the event
dates with their ages and any other details such as register notes, witnesses,
being a widow(er), being of a different parish, etc. I already had a feeling
that this was going to be a cat’s cradle.

So, James Astling2,
the father of Margaret Astling, had parents James Astling1 and Mary. Looking for a potential marriage to a Mary
revealed a strong candidate Mary Hall, in Averham — only five miles W of
Coddington — but the specific details depended on which database was consulted.

Here, we have two different years, and at least two
different names — we can easily rule out “Holing” as a transcription error.
It’s difficult to tell exactly which of the databases are independent and which
are copies of each other, but there are clearly two sources of information
having contributed to them: details of the marriage itself, and details of a
marriage licence.

In order to resolve these differences, I consulted a couple
of slightly older non-database sources: Phillimore’s marriage register extracts
(1912), and abstracts of Nottinghamshire marriage licenses from the Archdeaconry
Court (1935). They provided the following details

[1725-6 recorded at top of page]
Feb. 6, James Ashling, of Coddington, yeom., & Mary Hall, at Averham. [Bond
by John Hall, of Upton, yeom.].[12]
(second brackets in original text)

It can be seen in both of these sources that the progression
of the dated entries is according to the Julian calendar, and so the date was
really 6 Feb 1725/6, where 1725 was the (Julian) civil year and 1726 was the
historical year. See Synchronised
Dates. This doesn’t excuse those database dates being all over the place
but it does now make sense. James’s surname is slightly different in the two
sources, and the use of Jacob as his
given name may be explained by Jacob
and James being cognates of each other.

More importantly, these sources both confirm that it was our
James1 of interest, from
Coddington.

Prior to the Marriage Act 1753
(26 Geo. II. c33), canon law of the Church of England had required that banns
should be called or a marriage licence obtained before a valid marriage could
be conducted. It also required that the marriage took place in the parish in
which one of the parties had resided for four weeks, although the reality was
more flexible. The Act tightened this up and the marriage had to take
place in the parish where one of the parties resided; the four-week requirement
was eventually reduced to fifteen days in 1823.

The banns of marriage were a public proclamation of an
intended marriage in three consecutive weeks, on either Sundays or some holy
day in the parish church. The Act restricted this to just Sundays, but
originally — in Cromwell’s time — they could have also been called on three market
days in the local market place. Either way, it was a very public affair, and
one reason for taking the licence route — if you could afford it — was to keep
it more private. Another reason was that it reduced the three-week waiting
period, and so may have been chosen if there was some urgency, such as an
impending birth. This may have been the case here as their first son (James)
died just seven months after their marriage.

The databases containing parish register extracts are nearly
always deficient in their transcribed details, thus resulting in many rash
associations being made. Ideally, it’s best to consult the original registers,
or some image copies of their entries, but in this case I used the
aforementioned Phillimore marriage register extracts. In fact, I used the
NottsFHS marriage database as an index, and then checked for extra details in
the (dated but unindexed) Phillimore extracts. This could provide additional
information to help correlate the marriages with births and burials. The goal
was to account for all the James, Mary, and Elizabeth Astlings (and variants)
in the local area, and so form the backbone of a family reconstitution.

I included Mary Frandell here since it is not a common
surname (even including the –del(l) and –dal(l) variants), and the only
marriages were of three daughters in this Newark parish. It is quite likely,
then, that James was from a neighbouring parish, such as Coddington.

These marriage dates were then checked in the Phillimore extracts
to see if further details were available. Those registers use the following
common abbreviations.

The marriage of James Ashling to Elizabeth Taylor was by
licence, but the date was beyond the range of the Blagg and Wadsworth
abstracts, vol.II, in my possession. The following marriage details were
obtained from the Nottinghamshire Archives.

James Ashling aged above forty
seven years, a widower, and Elizabeth Taylor aged above forty three year both
of this Parish in the County of Nottingham were married in this church by
licence from H. Wade, Surrogate this Eighteenth day of March in the year of our
Lord 1775 by me Thomas Wakefield, Vicar of East Stoke.

This marriage was solemnized
between us:

James Ashling (Signed); Elizabeth
x (Her mark) Taylor

In the presence of Michael
Ashwell, Henry Aldridge, Samuel Birkett[21]

There were details of a corresponding marriage bond in the
University of Nottingham’s online catalogue of manuscripts and special
collections.

[a] This baptism was at
Orston St. Mary, but I’ve included it for reasons presented below.

I had included the “James Asling” who was baptised at Orston
St. Mary — just 10 miles S of Coddington, and a mere 5 miles SW of Long Bennington
— since there is a reference to such a person in the Coddington marriage and burial
registers, and yet there were no other Astling references (including variants)
in the Orston registers in the 17th or 18th Centuries.[25]

The following table merges these referenced personae
according to various correlated properties. The birth year calculations for
marriages where no ages were given, and also for childbirths, use the age of
“free” marriage when parental consent was unnecessary: 21. The Church of
England minimum for that time was only 12 for girls and 14 for boys, but such
cases were rare; the average age was actually mid-twenties.[26]

The mathematical symbols ‘<’ and ‘>’ are used to
indicate ‘before’ and ‘after’, respectively.

Name

Lifespan

Ref.

Context

Correlation

Mary

Hall

(< c1705)–(> 1726)

Phillimore

m. James Ashling

Mary Hall married James
Ashling1 in Averham, and
had 5 children (4 baptised).She died in 1735, the same year as her infant son
(John).

Asling

(< c1706)–(> 1735)

Table 4

Baptisms of 4 children

Asling

?–May 1735

Table 3

Burial

Frandell

(< c1730)–(> 1751)

Phillimore

m. James Asling

Mary married James2 in 1751. After baptising
10 children, she died in 1772, just a couple of years after her last child
(Martha).

Asling

(< c1732)–(> 1770)

Table 4

Baptisms of 10 children

Aslen

?–May 1772

Table 3

Burial. “Wife of James”

Bowman

c1731–(> 1756)

Phillimore

m. Edward Asling

James

Ashling

(< c1705)–(> 1727)

Phillimore

m. Mary Hall

James1 married Mary in 1726, but she died in 1735 after 5
children. James1
remarried to Elizabeth Willson in the same year.

Asling

(< c1714)–(> 1735)

Phillimore

m. Elizabeth Willson

Aslin

?–Aug 1726

Table 3

Burial. “Son of James”

First son of James and Mary
Hall

Aslin

Sep 1727–?

Table 4

Baptised son of James &
Mary

Second son of James and
Mary Hall

Asling

(< c1730)–(> 1751)

Phillimore

m. Mary Frandell

James2 was born 1727, married Mary in 1751, Elizabeth
Taylor in 1775, and Elizabeth (Dickinson) Baker in 1784.

Ashling (w.)

c1728–(> 1775)

Phillimore

m. Elizabeth Taylor

Asling (w.)

c1729–(> 1784)

Phillimore

m. Elizabeth Baker

Asling

?–Jan 1756

Table 3

Burial

James1.

Astling

?–Oct 1789

Table 3

Burial

James2.

Asling

c1755–Jul 1815

Table 3

Burial

James3, son of James2
and Mary Frandell. Elizabeth Watson was his second wife, his first
(also Elizabeth) having died earlier the same year.

Asling

Feb 1755–?

Table 4

Baptised son of James &
Mary

Asling (w.)

c1758–(> 1798)

Phillimore

m. Elizabeth Watson

Elizabeth

Willson

(< c1714)–(> 1735)

Phillimore

m. James Asling

Of the same generation as
Mary Hall, who died in 1735, and so must be the second wife of James1.

Dickinson

c1743–(> 1766)

Phillimore

m. Thomas Baker

Elizabeth Dickinson married
Thomas Baker, and then James Asling2.
She gave birth to just one child: Margaret Astling. She died aged 80.

Baker

c1744–(> 1784)

Phillimore

m. James Asling (w.)

Aslin

c1744–Nov 1824

Table 3

Burial

Whaite

(< c1766)–(> 1787)

Phillimore

m. John Aslin

Taylor

c1732–(> 1775)

Phillimore

m. James Ashling (w.)

Second wife of James2.

Asling

c1731–Feb 1783

Table 3

Burial. “Wife of James”

Watson

c1772-(> 1798)

Phillimore

m. James Asling (w.)

James3 married an unidentified Elizabeth but she died in
1798. He then married a much younger Elizabeth Watson the same year.

These results might be difficult to visualise but the
following tree will help enormously.

[ Followers of my Interactive
Trees in Blogs Using SVG post will notice the use of another option, here:
employing browser tooltips to display background details for people and
families. Just hover over the person or corresponding green family circle in the expanded version. ]

Figure 3 – Lineage of Margaret Hallam, née Astling.

Conclusion

This further research wholly supports the conclusions in the
previous article, but adds a little more detail.

The one weak point remains the military document suggesting
that Margaret’s husband, Thomas Hallam, was a POW in Napoleonic France until the
spring of 1814 since it didn’t confirm his place-of-birth. All other military
references to a Thomas Hallam could be dismissed, and this remaining one gave
the correct year of birth.

More than that, there was no evidence for any other
explanation of why Thomas was clearly absent for those years, or why he made a
subsequent appearance during 1814.

[24] NottsFHS, Parish Register Baptism
Index, CD-ROM, database (Nottingham, 1 Jan 2013), database version 3.0,
entries relating to a James As%l%n% at
Coddington All Saints; tabulated entry for James was actually from Orston St. Mary parish,
as indicated in the tablenote;CD hereinafter cited as
NottsFHS-Baptisms.

Entered genealogy in about 2004. Still heavily researching the history of all branches of my family (i.e. many different surnames). Working independently on a research project for a universal data model and source format for micro-history data (STEMMA, www.parallaxview.co/familyhistorydata). Former organising member of FHISO (http://fhiso.org/); currently Vice Chair.

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Although the views expressed here may draw strongly from the STEMMA private R&D project, they do not represent the views of FHISO of which I am associated. This is a personal blog by a genealogist who strives to record micro-history rather than either family history or a mere family tree.